Yesterday I blogged about the fact that the whole world had convinced itself that Apple were going to announcement a tablet device. And unless you live in a cave or are appearing in a reality television show where you get locked in a house for forty days, you’ll probably now know that Apple did just that.

In a rather puny attempt to set myself up as an observer of future technology trends, I speculated that early adopters would probably wish they’d waited for the next iteration. Clearly others agreed… Wired published Ten Things Missing From the iPad while Gizmodo could appear to only manage eight things but carried on to eleven and positioned them as things that suck.

The business world was also unimpressed, as Apple’s share price fell by around $7. So, here’s my tip (now that we’ve established my credentials as a gadget futurist)… buy an iPad the moment it hits the stores. Queue for three days if you need to. Can you imagine how awesome that airplane landing game will be on a big screen? That’s gotta be worth the money. Also, Florida Steve has some Apple shares, and he’s banking on them reaching $270. So when the iPad 2 ships with some of the fix-list ticked off, throw away your iPad 1 and get the new one. I know this makes sense because I live in a house that contains three people and eight iPods.

It must be nice to work for Apple, knowing that the slightest rumour of Steve Jobs breaking wind will generate a billion news articles. Apple have trained the industry well, and now we’re all waiting for their announcement events knowing that that something desirable will be unleashed upon a waiting world. You may not need it, but you’ll want it… which reminds me of one of the best ever news spoofs to hit the Internet, the MacBook Wheel video on The Onion. I guess we’re meant to laugh at the nerdy devotee who says “I’ll buy almost anything shiny as long as it’s shiny and made by Apple”, but the scary thing is that there’s a bit of him in many of us – and that would include me if I could afford to do so.

With this in mind, today the world is waiting for the expected announcement of an Apple tablet. To my knowledge, no-one from Apple has said it will happen, but various bits of information and speculation have been pieced together to the point where we’re all expecting the iSlate / iSlab / iTablet / iWantOne to be announced. The combined world of technology media could end up looking pretty stupid if Apple’s announcements for today consist of a retractable tape measure being added to the iPhone and an LED torch being added to the iPod nano. But assuming the hype is correct, who’s going to buy a first-generation Apple tablet? History shows that early Apple adopters are often rendered green with envy or red with rage when an improved model is released six months later. Given that Apple products aren’t cheap (well, okay iPods are a pretty reasonable price) the initial market for the Apple tablet could be restricted to the stupidly wealthy or the hopelessly devoted.

Going to Lotusphere? Do you use Lotus Notes? Do you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry. If you answered ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘yes’ to any of the others, then you’ll be interested in some resources offered by Geniisoft and The Turtle Partnership.

Firstly, Ben Langhinrichs has once again provided the Lotusphere agenda and session planning database. This is a Notes application which you can store locally, and then inspect the sessions and add them to your personal calendar.

The Turtle Partnership have taken Ben’s application and hosted in on their server, so you can get up-to-date information via replication. You can open the application from lotusphere.turtleweb.com and then grab a replica.

If you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry you can also access the session information from native mobile applications (created by The Turtle Partnership) on these two devices. Check the Turtle Partnership’s blog for instructions, but the easiest way to grab them is to go to the respective app stores for either device and search for ‘Lotusphere’.

Many thanks to Ben and the Turtle team for providing these resources to the Lotus community. I hope you’re kept in free drinks for the duration of Lotusphere.

Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called Twitter, apparently it’s quite popular. The Lotusphere team will be updating the Lotus Knows Twitter stream with information about the event. So if you’re attending, or if you’re stuck somewhere less interesting and want to keep up with the latest news, you should follow LotusKnows.

After a couple of weeks of hesitation I took the plunge and I’m now the proud and happy owner of a 24-inch Apple iMac. Lotus Notes 8.5, Symphony and Firefox are loaded – there’s still plenty to install and copy over but here’s the first impressions:

1. The setup was incredibly easy. Power, mouse, keyboard… a few questions. The most difficult thing was finding the home WiFi WEP key, and it wasn’t Apple’s fault that I can’t remember 10 characters. Child’s play.
2. 45 seconds from hitting the power button to actually being logged in and able to click on a program icon. In 45 seconds Windows will still be thinking about showing me a login box, and it’ll then be a good 2 – 3 minutes before I’d even bother thinking about loading any application. Okay, this iMac is much better specced than any Windows-based computer I’ve ever used.
3. Install of Notes and Firefox was very simple. It’s different to Windows installs, but considering I’ve never used this operating system it was a breeze.
4. Set-up of user accounts was simpler than simple. And once I was done and cooking dinner, Lolli logged in and customised her workspace (including adding a photo of herself from the built-in webcam).

But let’s be balanced… here’s the bad points:

1. It cost an arm and a leg. Actually, an arm, a leg and some other valuable internal organ which I’ll probably have to sell to medical research.
2. On Windows I do [Shift-Ins] to paste – haven’t worked out a good key combo yet. Although the menu says it’s [Squiggle-V].
3. The USB slots aren’t easy to get to (they’re at the back of the screen). Minor irritation.
4. The wife thinks she’s going to use it.

Before I watched the preview video, there was one big feature which was being Twittered and talked about… copy / cut and paste. No way. Imagine that, being able to copy some text and paste it elsewhere. Those whacky Apple guys, what will they think of next?

Okay, I’m being a little sarcastic, although as a non-iPhone / iPod touch user I wasn’t aware that copy / cut and paste wasn’t available on the device. Watching the video the support via the user interface looks very good, and includes a shake to undo (so maybe no good for people who are jogging or are very nervous).

Coincidentally I was at an IDC Unified Communications conference yesterday, and speaking to one of their analysts at lunch we discussed the iPhone and BlackBerry. The IDC analyst was of the opinion that the iPhone was firmly aimed at the consumer market. When you start to watch Apple’s video you could be forgiven for agreeing with him. They focus a great deal on gaming, music and social networking applications. There’s some very cool stuff – I know a certain 11 year old who was excited to hear about the Sims 3 and the characters’ ability to dig into the iTunes content on the device via the game. Multi-user gaming was pitched at bored kids on a car journey, although you could see the peer-to-peer connectivity being useful in a business context.

However, there was some business focus within the address – Oracle took to the stage, there were testimonials for medical applications, push-messaging is supported, as is support for calendar standards. There are huge array of features exposed via APIs for application developers – ability to make better use of Google maps being just one of them.

Cynics may say that Apple are confused and haven’t decided what they want the iPhone to be. For now I’d say that it seems to be emerging as a very powerful platform. So far my experience is that it hasn’t gathered major interest from corporate customers – lots of people have them in their hands but I haven’t seen anyone planning a mobile strategy around them in the way they do with BlackBerry. Clearly it’s important that we, IBM Lotus, support the iPhone with solutions such as iNotes Ultralite, Sametime Mobile and Connections Mobile. More APIs and more enterprise-ready features could see great acceptance from the corporate market, and also allow us to build better solutions.

One of the strange things about this Lotusphere is that there’s no big Notes / Domino announcements. I suppose it’s all about timing – Notes / Domino 8.5 have just shipped, and it’s too early to feature Notes 9. That’s not to say there aren’t any sessions on Notes / Domino… there are… loads, and they focus on topics as diverse as XPages for building Web 2.0 applications to deploying and administering Notes / Domino in efficient and cost-effective manners.

The big announcements and the most visible glimpses of the future have been around Connections 2.5, Sametime 8.5, Sametime Unified Telephony, LotusLive solutions and various bits and pieces surfacing on the iPhone.

However, if you know where to look you’ll find some info on the future of Notes. Yesterday I attended a session on new features in Notes 8.5 – although I knew most of it I picked up some new info, such as how to install and wire in a new plugin to integrate with LinkedIn. But the whole session was made really worthwhile with the brief tour of some future ideas. Jeff Eisen demoed a preview of tasks (to-dos) on the Notes sidebar, showing how easy it was to create and manipulate tasks. The really cool part was when he went into a new e-mail and inserted a new task (could be plural… tasks) into the body of an e-mail, explaining that the recipient would see those tasks moved into their own to-do list and become part of a task workflow process.

Right now I’m sitting in a session about e-mail archiving – important stuff as it relates to cost of ownership and also personal productivity – and as well as covering the current options they’ve spent a lot of time talking about things being done to make archiving easier, making the archives more seamlessly integrated with the user’s mail box and making it easier to find and access archived data. It’s great stuff and shows that the development teams are constantly pushing ahead with improvements in so many aspects of the product.

Yes, I know, we’ve been down this path before. But the question needs to be asked. This time it relates to an article on the BBC News Technology page, that well-known Microsoft PR machine which occasionally gives Apple and Google a nod too. Today’s article is entitled “Can Microsoft make its future mobile?” – and by the way it’s the Beeb who have missed out the possessive apostrophe, not me.

The article discusses the efforts of Symbian (perveyor of the operating system for Nokia devices), Apple (the iPhone, have you heard of that?), RIM (BlackBerry, but you knew that), Google, HTC, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. They’re all players in the mobile market. Some bigger than others – the article recognises that RIM are the big players in the corporate market, the iPhone is winning the mind-share battle, and Nokia have the most devices out there.

With that in mind, I have one question for the Beeb… why does it always have to be about Microsoft?

What do you buy the woman who has everything? A box to put it all in? The wife bought her main Christmas present at the airport on the way to Chicago, and it’s been tucked away ever since. It’s a handbag… can’t remember what make… Gucci or something like that. I’m about as interested in handbags as she is in catadioptric telescopes. Anyway, being a generous sort of guy, I recognise the need to purchase some Christmas surprises for the current Mrs Adams. But what…?

Okay, I have a small list. Then I saw the Technika Viewbox. Excellent, the wife loves her iPod and likes to download music videos from iTunes. And it was reduced to 75 quid. Perfect. So I decided to get down to Tesco to have a look at the technology close-up.

One thing you should be aware of is that we’re only 7 minutes away from the nearest branch of Tesco (which is located right next to one of the UK’s largest branches of Marks & Spencer). Yes, 7 minutes… if you drive there at 03:00. On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks before Christmas it’s a marathon trek. Anyway, I arrived, I parked in the nearest possible parking space to the entrance of Tesco (about half a mile away), bumped into my frolleague Jon Adams (no relation, but we have an amusing story about both walking through the door of 10 Downing Street), and found the Viewboxes. And then it struck me… maybe I should have bought an iPod with me.

After returning home and seeing to a couple of errands (including the usual father-chauffuer weekend job) I made some excuses and returned to Tesco. I parked half a mile from the entrance and walked through the rain, got to the Viewboxes, and stuck in Lauren’s iPod nano (because she has more movies than I do). After 5 minutes of fiddling about I worked out that there’s a setting on the iPod to tell it to output a video signal, and this successfully displayed a movie on the Viewbox’s screen. Pretty good… not Sony / Panasonic quality, but we’re talking 75 quid. At this point I started to over-analyse whether this would be something the wife would use, so decided to return home and do some subtle investigations.

Later – during a commercial break in Get Me A Celebrity, I’m Out Of Here – they showed an ad for the Viewbox. “Terrific” said the wife, “I’ve always wanted something like that”. Excellent. “Darren, pop down to Tesco tomorrow and get one”. Oh great.

So by 10:30 this morning I was back down at Tesco. As there’s fewer places for people to go on Sunday, the traffic was worse (even with my local-boy knowledge short-cut). I parked half a mile away from the door, and made my way to the Viewboxes. Hmmm, less in stock than yesterday, but still quite a few. I tried the wife’s iPod touch on the display model… slightly different procedure for getting it working, but fine nevertheless. I queued, I paid, I walked back to the car, and drove home.

Back in the kitchen the wife removed the Viewbox from the packaging, plugged it in and docked her iPod. She selected ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ by the now botox-ridden Mariah Carey. There was Mariah’s dulcet tones but no image… just some jumping lines. I ensured the iPod was docked properly. I tried my iPod. I tried the wife’s again. Nope… out of all the Viewboxes piled around the display model I’d picked the one that was kanckered.

Back in the car, back down to Tesco, parked slightly more than half a mile away from the door (everyone in Surrey was there now), walked back through the rain, through the door and to customers services. There was a small queue, which got longer as an elderly woman went through the process of a new mobile phone being activated. I was a hair’s breadth away from shouting “blimey love, go home and read the effin’ manual” when her transaction ended. After two more people it was my turn. They swapped it without an argument (that concerns me, I wonder how many more had been returned) and I asked if I could test the new one rather than be subjected to a fifth visit in one weekend. I got it out and plugged it in, and then docked my own iPod. At this point it’s worth noting that I only have one movie on my iPod – the DVD of ‘Incubus Live At Red Rocks’. And thus at full volume, the first song ripped out across the store with the delightful lyrics “Hey mega-lo-maniac, you’re no Jesus, yeah, you’re no f***ing Elvis”. Thankfully this was accompanied by live footage of California’s finest, so I repacked the Viewbox, walked back into the rain and returned home.

The Viewbox is now installed in the kitchen, the wife is extremely happy, she’s downloaded lots of music videos for Christmas songs… but I still need to get her something for Christmas.

The obvious retort to this post will be “you should have bought a Mac” (go on Wild Bill, say it). But the fact is that the current Mrs Adams and the gymnastic flute-playing genius needed a new computer. My work laptop was the only computer in the house capable of running the Sims 2, and although the wife’s computing needs are fairly simple (e-mail, eBay, iTunes) her old laptop is slow, drops the wireless connection too often for anyone’s liking, and has a battery that lasts about 2.7 seconds. So on the spur of the moment one day in Camberley I purchased a shiny new Compaq – 2 gb of RAM, a 120 gb hard disk, dual-core processor – for just a tad over £400. Unfortunately you can’t get a Mac for that money. And this new beast makes my IBM-provided laptop look distinctly low-spec.

Having been purchased during the Summer the Compaq, as you’d expect, runs Windows Vista. This was to be my first foray into Microsoft’s shiny new operating system. First impressions? It’s okay. I was expecting disasters after the negative press, but it seemed fine. I’ll even give it a few plus points… UPnP connectivity with the Archos has been flakey with Windows XP, but with Vista it’s reliable and fast. Nice.

But as you use Vista more you notice some things that seem a bit unfinished or just plain odd. Example: copying some files from one folder to another… if they already exist, Windows XP’s instructions are fairly simple to understand (overwrite, or don’t overwrite). With Vista I did a double-take on the dialog box, read the instructions, read them again, and was still confused.

Why, when I look at a folder, is there a green progress indicator moving across the address bar, even though all the contents are displayed? And why do I sometimes get a three minute lag when I open a folder before I see the contents.

On Sunday night I was using iTunes – although this is not my computer I’ve had to move my iTunes library onto it as it was taking up too much space on my ThinkPad. Suddenly an indicator popped up on the status bar – I clicked on it and it proudly proclaimed “This problem was caused by iTunes, which was created by Apple Inc. There is no solution for this problem at this time.”

Excuse me? What problem. iTunes was happily chugging along and working perfectly. The problem report also told me “A newer version of iTunes is available for download that might address this problem”. What problem?

I’m now looking at a laptop which is functioning perfectly but the problem report tells me that iTunes “stopped responding and was closed”. Eh? It didn’t stop responding, but it was closed… by me, after I’d finished using it.

On the subject of Windows and Microsoft, I see that the BBC are once again falling over themselves to be Microsoft’s free-of-charge PR machine. Four Microsoft stories on the Technology news page today, covering Windows 7, Azure and working with Google and Yahoo.

Among the new capabilities of Windows 7 are some touch-screen effects nicked from the iPhone. I do believe that users would need new hardware to achieve that, so at least they managed some level of consistency. The computer manufacturers will be most pleased, as will manufacturers of screen wipes.

The iTunes Store has just sent me a very nice e-mail telling me that I can pre-order Dido’s new album ‘Safe Trip Home’. It says “Because you’ve downloaded music by Dido from iTunes in the past”. What? I bloody well haven’t. That’s tantamount to slander. It’s almost the same as saying I drive a Fiat Punto, wear high heels and worry about water retention once a month.

Funny that it’s called ‘Safe Trip Home’. Listening to Dido while driving would be anything but a safe trip home, as falling asleep at the wheel is incredibly dangerous. Here’s a money-saving tip… rather than buying an entire Dido album, just buy one track and play it twelve times. The effect is exactly the same.

Why would you want to pre-order something off iTunes? It’s not like they’re going to run out of files to download on the day it’s released.